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Originally Posted by Mr.Impreza
Yeah agreed. I think the ones that look faded have spent all there life outside and never were waxed.
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It's the nature of red pigments, they are on the weak end of the color spectrum. If you take something that's printed with lots of red ink and leave it in the sun, it will fade away much quicker than any other color. Honda's red car paint is notorious for fading quickly. Even the burgundy cars will turn brownish after a while.
If you want a car color that won't fade over time, get blue, silver or white. The clearcoat will fail before the color does.
Nerd speak: "Dyes and pigments work by absorbing certain wavelengths of light and reflecting or transmitting the rest. When a dye molecule absorbs a photon, an electron is excited to a higher energy state. Most of the time (neglecting fluorescence), the molecule de-excites by giving off heat and returns to the ground state intact. However, because the excited state is a high energy state, it has the potential to undergo a chemical reaction, breaking a covalent bond or otherwise irreversibly reacting with another molecule. This changes the electronic structure of the molecule which changes its absorption properties: e.g. many dyes that absorb visible light have large systems of conjugated double bonds and if these are broken, the absorbance can shift to much shorter wavelengths. How likely this kind of destructive chemistry is depends on the nature of the dye. Organic dyes tend to be more susceptible to photobleaching than things like quantum dots and inorganic pigments."